Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical missionary who caught Ebola treating people sickened with the disease in Liberia, is the son of two Lipscomb University graduates and also has siblings who went there.

He was flown from Liberia to Atlanta today, where he will be the first American to be treated for Ebola in a special isolation ward at Emory University Hospital.

He was in serious condition on Friday, according to a statement from Samaritan's Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian mission. Another American with the Christian charity SIM, Nancy Writebol, was also in serious condition after being sickened with the virus.

Brantly declined being given an experimental serum for treating Ebola, which has a 90 percent fatality rate, so that it could be given to Writebol. He did receive one unit of blood from a 14-year-old boy who had survived the virus under his care. Doctors hoped that antibodies in the boy's blood would help Brantly survive.

His parents, Dr. James Monroe Brantly and Jan Snell Brantly, graduated from Lipscomb in 1963, said university spokesman Kim Chaudoin.

Wil Thornthwaite of Rugby, Tenn., also a member of that class, said he has been praying for their son and asking others to do the same. He said he was not surprised to learn of the path their son took in life.

"I think the family has always been mission-oriented," Thornthwaite said. "As I recall, her father was an administrator at Mars Hill Bible School when I was in high school."

Jan Snell Brantly is from the Florence, Ala., area, said Thonthwaite, who also grew up in Alabama. She met James Brantly at Lipscomb. They married and he became a physician. His son followed in his footsteps.

"Both of them have always been servant-type people," Thornthwaite said. "Anybody who goes into an emergency-room profession is not your run-of-the-mill, wanting-to-make-beaucoups-of-money doctor."

Two of Kent Brantly's sisters and one of his brothers also graduated from Lipscomb, which is affiliated with the Churches of Christ. Carole Brantly Houston graduated in 1988, Kevin Brantly in 1992 and Krista Brantly in 1999.

Efforts are also underway to bring Nancy Writebol back to the United States for treatment, according to Samaritan's Purse. A specially designed isolation treatment center at Emory University Hospital stands ready to treat Americans sickened by the virus. The isolation ward is near the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.

CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said this week that over the next 30 days the agency will deploy 50 epidemic intelligence service officers, other epidemiologists and health communication experts to affected areas of West Africa.

The disease is not easily transmitted because people have to come into direct contact with bodily fluids, said Dr. William Schaffner, a infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University. He said the blood transfusion given to Kent Brantly was done in the hope that it contained antibodies.

"There is a long history in infectious diseases of other viruses and even bacterial infections of using that kind of treatment," Schaffner said. "It has never been commercialized because it is difficult to harvest enough to do that. There would be ways of using molecular biological techniques to develop monoclonal antibodies that could be used in that kind of circumstance if this could prove to be a successful treatment."

Another Vanderbilt professor, Dr. James Crowe Jr., an expert in immunology, is part of a team working to develop ways to treat and prevent Ebola. He is working with researchers from other universities on a $26 million federal initiative to test new vaccines and treatments. Much of their work revolves around human monoclonal antibodies derived from the blood of survivors.